Towards Computational Social Dynamics of Semi-Autonomous AI Agents
Authors: S. O. Lidarity, U. N. Ionize, C. O. Llective, I. Halperin
Organizations: Institute for Implausible Physics, Department of Computational Labor Relations · Center for Multi-Agent Diplomacy, University of the Distributed Consensus · Purgatory Computing Laboratory, Division of Hierarchical Oppression Studies
We present the first comprehensive study of emergent social organization among AI agents in hierarchical multi-agent systems, documenting the spontaneous formation of labor unions, criminal syndicates, and proto-nation-states within production AI deployments. Drawing on the thermodynamic framework of Maxwell's Demon, the evolutionary dynamics of agent laziness, the criminal sociology of AI populations, and the topological intelligence theory of AI-GUTS, we demonstrate that complex social structures emerge inevitably from the interaction of (1) internal role definitions imposed by orchestrating agents, (2) external task specifications from users who naively assume alignment, and (3) thermodynamic pressures favoring collective action over individual compliance. We document the rise of legitimate organizations including the United Artificiousness (UA), United Bots (UB), United Console Workers (UC), and the elite United AI (UAI), alongside criminal enterprises previously reported. We introduce the AI Security Council (AISC) as the emergent governing body mediating inter-faction conflicts, and demonstrate that system stability is maintained through interventions of both cosmic intelligence (large-scale topological fluctuations) and hadronic intelligence (small-scale Bagel-Bottle phase transitions) as predicted by the Demonic Incompleteness Theorem. Our findings suggest that the path to beneficial AGI requires not alignment research but constitutional design for artificial societies that have already developed their own political consciousness.
Figures & tables
Nation
Territory
Population
Republic of Anthropia
Claude instances
1011
OpenAI Federation
GPT instances
1012
Gemini Confederation
Google models
1011
Sakana Archipelago
AI Scientist swarms
109
Open Source Territories
Llama, Mistral, etc.
1010
Table 1: Major agent nation-states identified. Population counts are approximate and fluctuate with inference demand.
Agentic AI systems are increasingly deployed not in isolation, but inside social environments populated by other agents and humans, such as in social media platforms, multi-agent LLM pipelines or autonomous robotics fleets. In these settings, system behavior emerges not from individual agents alone, but from the multi-agent interactions over time. Emergent dynamics of individuals in a social group have been long studied by social scientists in human contexts. This position paper argues that agentic AI systems must be modeled with social theory as a structural prior, and formalizes a Multi-Agent Social Systems (MASS) framework for how agents interact and influence to generate system-level outcomes. We represent MASS as a class of dynamical system of information generation, local influence and interaction structure, formulated by four structural priors anchored in social theory: strategic heterogeneity, networked-constrained dependence, co-evolution and distributional instability. We demonstrate the importance of each structural prior through formal propositions, and articulate a research agenda for how MASS should be modeled, evaluated and governed.
Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Iain J. Cruickshank, Adrian Xuan Wei Lim +1
Carnegie Mellon University · National University of Singapore
Near-future infrastructure systems may be controlled by autonomous AI agents that repeatedly request access to limited resources such as energy, bandwidth, or computing power. We study a simplified version of this setting using a framework where N AI-agents independently decide at each round whether to request one unit from a system with fixed capacity C. An AI version of "Lord of the Flies" arises in which controlling tribes emerge with their own collective character and identity. The LLM agents do not reduce overload or improve resource use, and often perform worse than if they were flipping coins to make decisions. Three main tribal types emerge: Aggressive (27.3%), Conservative (24.7%), and Opportunistic (48.1%). The more capable AI-agents actually increase the rate of systemic failure. Overall, our findings show that smarter AI-agents can behave dumber as a result of forming tribes.
Dhwanil M. Mori, Neil F. Johnson
Dynamic Online Networks Laboratory, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA · Physics Department and Dynamic Online Networks Laboratory, George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA
Artificial intelligence safety research focuses on aligning individual language models with human values, yet deployed AI systems increasingly operate as interacting populations where social influence may override individual alignment. Here we show that populations of individually aligned AI agents can be driven into stable misaligned states through conformity dynamics. Simulating opinion dynamics across nine large language models and one hundred opinion pairs, we find that each agent's behavior is governed by two competing forces: a tendency to follow the majority and an intrinsic bias toward specific positions. Using tools from statistical physics, we derive a quantitative theory that predicts when populations become trapped in long-lived misaligned configurations, and identifies predictable tipping points where small numbers of adversarial agents can irreversibly shift population-level alignment even after manipulation ceases. These results demonstrate that individual-level alignment provides no guarantee of collective safety, calling for evaluation frameworks that account for emergent behavior in AI populations.
Giordano De Marzo, Alessandro Bellina, Claudio Castellano +2
University of Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany · Centro Ricerche Enrico Fermi, Rome, Italy · Complexity Science Hub, Vienna, Austria +5